Mercenaries involved in Bolivia plot

An Irishman killed by Bolivian police who apparently foiled a plot to kill president Evo Morales had no criminal record, an Irish government minister has said, apparently to deny involvement. But Michael Dwyer’s fellow plotters—two Croatians, a Romanian, and a Hungarian, all had demonstrable rightwing fascistoid pasts and affiliations, and fit the “merc” profile well. It’s worth recalling that Croatia and Romania, as well as Hungary, to this day harbor sizable numbers of unrepentant reactionaries. All three nations collaborated with Nazi Germany in WW2 and sent armies to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. Many of their nationals fled to Latin America during the postwar period, fomenting the growth of neofascist formations throughout the continent. Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Brazil and Argentina got a significant number of such characters. —Eds.

Pres. Evo Morales, a genuine leftist leader, is the target of a "destabilization" offensive conducted by Bolivia's rightwing with help from abroad.

The Department of Foreign Affairs is working to repatriate Dwyer’s body.

The rightwing opposition to President Morales is thought to have organized and paid for the plot, whose ultimate objective was to create internal chaos and decapitate the administration of Pres. Evo Morales, a revolutionary left leader. Bolivia’s police, loyal to Morales, suspect that the plot has connections with foreign intelligence agencies, as well, chiefly the American services.

In a statement, his family said they were devastated by the death of the 24-year-old from Ballinderry, County Tipperary. They said they were grateful for the support, love and prayers of their wider family, friends and their local community. The Republic of Ireland has no embassy in Bolivia and an official from the Irish embassy in Argentina has travelled to La Paz. Graphic images of Mr Dwyer were published in the Bolivian press.

Confusion surrounds the precise nature of events surrounding the shooting, which led to the death of the graduate of construction management from Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology. Local Tipperary Fine Gael councillor Ger Darcy said the close-knit rural community had been stunned by the news. “There is complete shock. It’s bad enough to lose a son or a daughter without it being under these circumstances,” he said. A page on a social networking site which belonged to Mr Dwyer has been taken down. On another social networking site he is listed as a friend of one of the other dead men, Eduardo Rozsa Flores. Tributes have been left on the site by friends and family. On one of the sites he listed among his interests, pistol shooting and airsoft, a plastic-pellet firing combat game. He is pictured wearing combat fatigues.

Three men, including Mr Dwyer, died and two others were arrested in the eastern city of Santa Cruz after police fought a gun battle with what Bolivian authorities described as a “mercenary gang”. Police said two of the five fought for Croatian independence after the break-up of former Yugoslavia. The three others are said to be Irish, Romanian and Hungarian. The gun battle took place in Santa Cruz, an eastern Bolivian city and hub of anti-Morales sentiment.

President Evo Morales told a news conference at a summit in Trinidad and Tobago that he asked Obama to publicly repudiate an assassination plot against him during a morning meeting the U.S. president held with 12 South American leaders.

Obama responded that he was unfamiliar with the incident but assured Morales “his administration was not involved” and “made it clear he does not endorse or condone the use of violence against democratically elected governments,” said a senior U.S. official.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.

Bolivian authorities say they crushed on Thursday a group comprised mostly of foreign mercenaries that was planning to kill Morales and his vice president. Police killed three alleged conspirators, including an Irishman and a Romanian.

Morales, a former coca-growers’ leader and Bolivia’s first indigenous president, did not allege U.S. involvement in the purported plot.

But he said Obama’s vow in a speech at Summit of the America’s inauguration on Friday rings hollow without a denunciation.

“Obama said three things: There are neither senior or junior partners. He said relations should be of mutual respect, and he spoke of change,” Morales said. “In Bolivia … one doesn’t feel any change. The policy of conspiracy continues.”

The close ally of Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez said that if Obama does not repudiate the alleged assassination plot, “I might think it was organized through the embassy.”

Morales expelled U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg in September 2008 and kicked out the Drug Enforcement Administration the next month for conspiring with the political opposition to incite violence.

The administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush subsequently suspended trade preferences to Bolivia that local business leaders say could cost it 20,000 jobs.

Obama has been so consumed with pressing issues such as the global economic crisis that he has yet to put in place a Latin America team to deal with thorny regional issues such as relations with Bolivia, analysts say.

“Nobody in Washington is paying any attention,” said Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network, a Bolivia-based drug policy think tank.

[Thank God the Washington mafia is distracted by other “more pressing matters” of their own making. They give some breathing room to progressive movements in Latin America. —Eds.]

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It’s clear the plot was and remains to plunge Bolivia into a state of chaos,, making it ungovernable, and thereby precipitating the secession of the rich, predominantly Europeanized, and rightwing-dominated lowlands from the rest of the nation. The plot was clearly a rightwing/CIA provocation. The supposed planned attempt on the Cardinal—a vocal opponent of Pres. Morales—was also a move designed to pin the crime on the Morales government. A filthy reactionary plot, as usual. Follow the threads all the way to McLean, Virginia, and other intelligence services HQs in Europe, and possibly Latin America.

BigBoli wrote on 04/19/2009 02:57:49 PM:Crow: Leftist in the Balkans?
No. If you would know better the composition of the immigration of Europeans to Bolivia you would see that there are a lot of Yugoslavians that came to Bolivia after WWII (ex-nazis). Do you know why Yugoslavia got divided? They cannot live with other races and ethnicities. Bolivian indigenous people are not their favorite either.

Bolivian police closed in on the group Thursday in the eastern city, sparking a dramatic gun battle as the suspects fled to a downtown hotel and blew out its windows with a grenade.

Police commander General Victor Hugo Escobar identified the dead ringleader of the band as 49-year-old Eduardo Rosza Flores, son of a Hungarian father and Bolivian mother.

Rosza commanded a brigade in the Balkans after arriving there as a war correspondent in 1991, according this his personal Web blog.

The firefight with police also killed Magyarosi Arpak, a Romanian sniper, and Michel Martin Dwyer, an Irish expert in martial arts and weapons, the police commander said.

Police arrested Mario Francisco Tadik Astorga, 58, a Bolivian-Croatian who also fought in the Balkans, and Elot Toazo, a Hungarian computer science expert.

The bloody fingerprints of the Right are undeniable in this plot, and if it were any other leader (that is, any bourgeois American lackey leader) Evo Morales’ complaints about plots to assassinate him would make sympathetic headlines on the US media. Instead, because Evo is a leftist, his statements are ridiculed or omitted from the press. What else can we expect from the despicable corporate media and US journalists in particular?

Magyarosi Arpak, is not Romanian, he is a Hungarian national born in Romania, and a member of a Hungarian autonomy movement on Romanian territory, so you could say he was an anti-Romanian. Romanians were forced to collaborate with Nazi Germany, after most of it’s territory was split between USSR and Hungary during the WWII by Molotov and Ribbentrop. Thank you, Evo Morales!

Elod Toazo is also a Hungarian with Romanian citizenship, fighting for the Hungarian minority autonomy in Romania. He was a high school classmate of Magyarosi Arpad. Our world is such a small village! Probably they went to Bolivia to get some real fighting experience. Too bad for them, and for their sponsors.